"Even with an improving buyers' market, our agents are telling us that buyers seem to have taken a bit of a break: instead of 20 buyers looking at new homes on day one, there were only 10 is the comment we're hearing," said Mike Grady, president and COO, Coldwell Banker Bain, Bellevue, in the latest Northwest Multiple Listing Service report.

"While we may be lifting the pedal from the metal, we remain very much in the left lane, exceeding the posted speed limit by a significant amount."

And that effect hasn't even spread throughout the region all that much: While King County enjoyed a rise in supply coupled with a slight drop in pending and closed sales, Pierce county inventory dropped around 3.4 percent. Brokers in the area also reported more pending sales than new listings, with year-over-year prices up nearly 14 percent.

"The market in South Sound is bolstered by the reality that our houses are cheaper," said Dick Beeson, principal managing broker at RE/MAX Professionals in Gig Harbor, in the NWMLS report. "That fact alone keeps our inventory, our number of pending sales, and our number of closings similar to last year even though we've faced higher interest rates."

As another broker noted, buyers seem to be willing to spend two or three hours in their cars each day if it means buying twice as much house.

Which is true, even if you don't leave King County.

As the listings above show, two condos that are further away from Seattle's center are twice as big (around 1,000 square feet) for about half as much (around $250,000 as opposed to almost $500,000).

And for what was once considered a starter-home, prices don't often get that much easier. Though the 23 MLS counties saw single family home prices rise 8.4 percent from July 2017 to last month, condo prices in that same time period increased about 10.2 percent.

King is also the county where more than half the condo sales occurred, with a price jump of about 12 percent from a year ago. Houses in King County, during that time, saw a 7.55 percent increase.

Which, sadly, seems to just confirm many brokers' trepidation around condos as a "starter" and the market as a whole. As summed up by J. Lennox Scott, chairman and CEO of John L. Scott Real Estate, "For homes priced below a million dollars, the sales intensity for new listings has come off the extreme frenzy in the spring to just frenzy."

SeattlePI reporter Zosha Millman can be reached at zoshamillman@seattlepi.com. Follow Zosha on Twitter at @zosham. Find more from Zosha here on her author page.